The Age of Reason
by Honesty
Summary: After an uneasy night's sleep, Murtogg and Mullroy try to make sense of undead pirates.


TITLE: The Age of Reason  
  
AUTHOR: Mogs  
  
FANDOM: PotC  
  
GENRE: Vignette  
  
PAIRING: None  
  
RATING: PG  
  
WARNINGS: None  
  
FEEDBACK: Please! Please!  
  
DISCLAIMER: Not mine. *sigh*  
  
SUMMARY: Murtogg and Mullroy, trying to make sense of undead pirates.   
  
A/N: Apologies in advance for any violation of history. Please let me know and I'll set right.  
  
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It was the first yell that woke him up, distinct seconds before the second, followed by the creak and crash as someone managed to fall out of the hammock slung next to his.  
  
"Put a sock in it," someone mumbled, and then something about a body not being allowed any sleep around these parts.  
  
Murtogg frowned and swung his legs over the edge of his hammock, looking down at Mullroy, who was now on the floor, starting to sit up and rubbing the back of his head. He didn't look up at Murtogg.  
  
"What'd you do that for?" Murtogg asked in spite of himself.  
  
Mullroy normally slept like the dead. He never made a sound, never even shifted in his hammock. In fact, several times since they'd come back after the incident with the Governor's daughter he'd woken up abruptly and felt compelled to check that Mullroy was, in fact, not dead. It always made him feel rather foolish, but at least Mullroy had never caught him at it. Mullroy always had strong views on how foolish Murtogg was, something Murtogg considered deeply unreasonable considering that Mullroy himself was hardly officer calibre himself.  
  
He was still sitting there on the floor, rubbing his head and staring, and it was a few seconds longer before he looked up at Murtogg, looking annoyed and half-asleep.  
  
"What do you think I did it for? I was asleep, wasn't I? I had a dream."  
  
Someone else shifted in their hammock. "Shut up. Please, shut up, both of you," they moaned indistinctly, and from the abrupt shift and grunt they gave, Murtogg judged they had rolled over and perhaps covered their ears.  
  
Mullroy gave Murtogg a vexed look and stood up, unslinging his hammock from the beam above. "Going to the galley. Go back to sleep." He picked his way past the other hammocks with exaggerated caution more noisy than his normal walk, and Murtogg watched him go.  
  
Something made him think Mullroy wasn't very happy, in which case the best thing to do would be to leave him alone. But sometimes people who were unhappy didn't want to be alone at all. How did you tell the difference?  
  
Well, he'd just gone off on his own, which was probably a sign that he didn't want to talk to anybody. But it could just have been a sign that he didn't want to sleep any more. There was probably less than an hour till the morning watch started, after all. But ... if Mullroy didn't want people talking to him he could just tell him to leave, and if he did, he wasn't going to come and ask.  
  
He stowed his own hammock, and made his way through to the galley, trying not to wake anyone else even though he still won several muttered oaths as he passed.  
  
The galley was almost pitch-black - it was worth several lashes to be burning a candle after house - but there was enough light from the porthole to make out Mullroy, sitting in his normal place with his elbows on the table.  
  
"I couldn't sleep," Murtogg said by way of excuse.  
  
"Right." He sounded dull, indifferent. So ... he probably didn't want company. Murtogg cast around in his mind for an excuse, ransacking his mind for likely excuses.  
  
"I'd better go and shave," he said after a moment of deliberation. He sounded far too hesitant. "Beat the rush."  
  
He turned, nearly tripping over a chair he'd not seen in the near darkness, and stumbled his way almost to the door when Mullroy's voice stopped him.  
  
"Was it the Black Pearl?"  
  
Murtogg turned in the doorway, his mouth open. "Was what the Black Pearl?"  
  
"That ship you saw."  
  
"What ship?"  
  
Mullroy sighed irritably. "You remember Sparrow talking about the Black Pearl? That day Miss Swann took that tumble off the fort. Well, you said you'd seen the Black Pearl."  
  
Murtogg gulped, and closed the galley door, sitting at the table opposite Mullroy. "I saw a ship with black sails, but you said it couldn't have been the Black Pearl because-" because it wasn't crewed by the damned and captained by a man so evil that hell itself spat him back out.  
  
"-because the Black Pearl didn't exist. Which we now know, obviously, is not the case. Well, was it?"  
  
Mullroy's tone was sharp, as if he'd spent too much time listening to the Commodore, and for a moment Murtogg felt rather lost. "Was what?" he asked, and Mullroy tutted at him, his face invisible in the near-darkness. "Oh. That."   
  
Murtogg frowned and thought. Black sails. Not just black sails but ragged black sails. Did he really remember that? Yes, because he'd been thinking that it must have been a terrible battle to get the sails in that bad a shape, and wondering which of the three Harwich shipyards would get their custom for repairs. And the shape was ... different from regular ships. Murtogg closed his eyes, pondering. He was no scholar as to letters and numbers, but he had a reasonable eye for shapes and ships. He traced it absently on the table from stern to aft, as he'd seen her glide past the dockyards without even checking her pace.  
  
Yes. He looked up to catch Mullroy's eyes in the darkness, watching him anxiously.  
  
"Yes. Yes, it was." And then because that wasn't enough, "I remember the sails."  
  
Mullroy must have been holding his breath because he now released it in a rush. "How do you stand it?" he asked bitterly.  
  
This was not the moment to be asking 'stand what?' "Well..." Murtogg hesitated.  
  
"You don't see it, do you? This is the age of reason, not idiot superstitions. Those skeletons - that whole ship - they should not exist! It's against all the laws of nature. But-"  
  
Murtogg sat very still, and it was with a very different, almost scared voice that Mullroy completed the sentence: "But they do."  
  
He looked down sharply. If Mullroy was afraid the last thing he'd want was for him to see it. But then if Mullroy had gone to all that trouble to ask, he really did deserve an answer.  
  
"Never really thought about it, actually," he said slowly. "There wasn't much talk of reason and nature when I was a lad, except as how it affected the ploughing or the harvesting. And there's a sight more superstition in the country than there is in the town."  
  
Mullroy, he knew, had been a Londoner, born and bred, and things were different there. With everyone living all hug-a-mug within the city walls he supposed there wasn't room for the sprites and ghosties too. And being a city, it was full of scholars who all used phrases like 'the age of reason', and swore that all that existed could be explained by science - and would be, before the eighteenth century was done. Murtogg didn't know about that, but then it wasn't so many years since the scholars' fathers had come to burn his own grandmother as a witch. Things were different when there was you and the land - or the sea, come to that - and the land was so big, and you weren't big at all beside it. A man could get to thinking things, that way.  
  
"Maybe..." Mullroy would laugh, he knew it. "Maybe it's all just science, but science we haven't explained yet. There could be a reason, you know. We just don't know it yet."  
  
He braced himself, and Mullroy did laugh, coughing out the word 'reason' as though it was the most foolish thing Murtogg had ever said.  
  
"Well it could be," he said, feeling a little hurt.  
  
He looked across the table, watching him calm his laughter. "All right," he said. "It could be." Mullroy looked more like Mullroy again now, and for a moment their gazes met. "Thank you."  
  
And then he held out his right hand, and Murtogg shook it with great solemnity across the table.  
  
END 


End file.
